[macdummy]

I'm still a new mac user so bare with me.

I have read a bunch of message threads on this forum concerning this matter as well as outside sources. I need to know the skinny on inactive memory in particular.

Based off of everything I have read, inactive memory is the same as free memory. However if that is the case, I am having a major memory problem.

The current machine that I use for work is a powermac dual 2.0 g5 with 2.5 gigs of RAM. Being a new mac user, my buddy told me that it's OK not to restart the computer. I was very curious about this statement coming from a windows background, where I basically had to restart the computer at least 2-3 times per day.

My main concern is memory management. Here's what happened. I had 10 apps running, (mail, vpc, firefox, safari, microsoft word, ical, itunes, iphoto, audio hijack and x-chat aqua) as well as several dashboard widgets. i don't recall the entire amount, but these apps all together used a little less than 700-800 megs of real RAM. during this time, my inactive RAM was 1.49 gigs, and my free RAM was just shy of 30 megabytes.

30 megs of free RAM was kinda low I thought, but what the heck, i figured with all the material i read i shouldn't be concerned because there was still plenty of inactive RAM (1.3 gigs) that any app could use.

well, then i opened up Civilzation 3 complete and started to play that in windowed mode beacuse i was curious about how much RAM it would use so i wanted to check out activity monitor while i was playing.

on a standard sized map, everything was stuttering and freezing. it was the first time i played the game with such behavior. i looked at activity monitor and Civ3 ONLY had 90 megabytes of RAM allocated. i didn't think this was right unless it was done on purpose to use so little memory. so i restarted the computer and relaunced civ3 with nothing else. blamo. 270 megs of RAM goes straight to the game.

so my question now is, (and i'm not sure it is possible) how can i divert 'inactive' RAM to 'free' RAM within OS X? or if my whole situation is normal, is there something wrong with my computer?

[eevyl]

Inactive RAM is not equal to free RAM, and I'm sure it has been talked here more than a couple of times, myself included.

Inactive RAM is RAM not being used right now by running apps, in some cases it can be retrieved as it is cached stuff from the OS that can be ditched, and if it's from a running app, it can be swapped to disk.

Not sure what was going on with your Civilization 3, though.

[TETENAL]

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107918

[macdummy]

thanks for the replies. sorry if this has been rehashed over and over again. i just thought my particular case with civ3 would was kind of unique so i restarted the topic.

so do you think it's poorly written software or something is up with my computer? reading that apple knowledge base article, i would hope that some of the RAM i have sitting in my inactive zone would go straight back into civ3 but it doesn't appear to be doing so.

[Chuckit]

If Civilization asks for the memory, it will get the memory. End of story. If Civilization asked for memory and didn't receive it, the program would probably crash. There's no real way I could tell you why the program uses certain amounts of memory at certain times, but the kernel will allocate memory to programs as needed.

[macdummy]

ok if it's the end of story, then i guess something is wrong with my computer or the game.